Tim Ferriss: 10 Years Later...

James Altucher
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James Altucher
You know, I want to congratulate my friend Tim Ferriss on the 10th anniversary of his podcast. It is such an excellent podcast. It's one of the few podcasts I regularly listen to. Highly recommended if you don't already listen to it. He's been a great guy, a great friend over the years.

We don't always keep in touch, but he's I always count him among my long distance friends. And congratulations to him on having a 10th year anniversary of his podcast. I remember when he was first considering the podcast. He was calling around to other podcasters, including me, and he was doing his Tim Ferriss thing of researching and asking people as many questions as possible. And he thoroughly prepared and instantly became one of the top five podcasts out there.

So congratulations, Tim. This is my first episode on my podcast where Tim was the guest. It brings back fond memories, also from ten years ago. So here's Tim Ferriss being an amazing guest on my podcast.

T Mobile
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altager show.

James Altucher
So Tim, the first thing I want to talk about, there's actually a lot of topics I want to talk to you about. So many things have been happening in your life, but the first thing is you bought the rights back to your tv show, the Tim Ferriss experiment. And I was really disappointed initially when I heard that it was canceled. I was kind of going through them and I didn't have a chance to watch all of them. So now am I going to have a chance to watch all of them?

Tim Ferriss
You will have a chance, and we can definitely dig into the backstory, the entire division at Turner Broadcasting was shut down. So not just my show, every show that they had made, whether it was doing well or not, as well as every piece of online content, webisodes, everything, the dozens of people involved all had their content just put in the vault. So at the time that you were probably checking them out, I think only the first two maybe were up on iTunes. I only saw the Stuart Copeland, one of the best drummers in the world, was teaching you how to drum so that you could drum in a live concert with foreigner. Yeah, that's right.

James Altucher
And they were kind of picking on you. Foreigner was kind of like saying, you're going to totally screw up, man. Yeah. They were good at applying some pressure, which, you know, sometimes you need the kind of the stern father to shake his hand at you. So I responded pretty well to that.

Tim Ferriss
But the show is going to have. Well, I am launching, and by the time people hear this, they should be able to see it, which is all 13 episodes at once. I'm launching it House of Cards style, so I want people to be able to binge watch this whenever they want. I'm putting out everything at once, and it's been a long journey to get here, so I'm very, very excited about it. And it took a long time just to make the show in the first place, which was a year, year and a half ago with the people I wanted to work with.

It took time to find an agreement where I would be able to select a group as talented as 0.0. They do all of Anthony Bourdain's work, which is really cinematic and gritty. And they have a reputation for just putting out kind of film quality verite as opposed to. So non fiction television as opposed to reality, so called reality tv. And, Tim, you know, I spent some time working on documentaries.

James Altucher
I used to work. Sorry about the train. That's okay. I used to work at HBO doing some documentary stuff, and I can see this was not. These episodes were not four hour work weeks.

Tim Ferriss
Like, no way. No way. You must have done it looked. It honestly looked to me about, I don't know, 50 or 60 hours or more of filming and then another 20 hours of editing for each episode. That's what it seemed to me.

Oh, at least. Yeah, I mean, at least you nailed it. So I would say two things. If you want a four hour workweek, don't work in television, at least not in the traditional sense. Second thing is the purpose of the four hour work week is obviously to be able to allocate time to what you want to allocate it to.

And this was something I was. It was the most exciting thing in my life at the time that we were putting it together. So I was happy to put in crazy time, but it ended up. We did. If you can believe this, James, you've done some production work before, so you'll appreciate this.

13 weeks worth of shows. So 13 weeks straight, and we're filming Monday to Friday, then we fly out Saturday, have meetings on Sunday to prep for Monday, and then we're off to the races, filming a new episode on Monday. Pretty much every time we filmed, probably, or my days were like, twelve to 16 hours a day. Every day for that 13 week period. Yeah, because you're not just being filmed.

James Altucher
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to remind people this show was about you kind of learning these incredible feats from scratch. So it's not just you being filmed, it's also you spending the time to learn. So it's hard. Well, it's not only me spending the time to learn, but also I was a co executive producer, so I was reviewing all the rough cuts, I was reviewing the fine cuts, sending back production notes in the production meetings to figure out what type of scenes or camera positioning we might use. I mean, obviously, I had very, very experienced people helping with the technical stuff, but it was a very collaborative, very intense process.

Tim Ferriss
And the goal, of course, being not to make it the look how cool Tim is show, but to showcase the trials and tribulations, the failures, the challenges, but also the occasional miracles that you can engineer with a better toolkit and just a handful of accelerated learning techniques that other people can use. So that's kind of the idea, I guess. It's like Mythbusters meets jackass in a way. I don't know. Also meets four hour chefs.

Oh, yeah. I feel like the four hour chef and the four hour body captured a lot of the essence of what you were then trying to move into tv with. Oh, absolutely. And the fact of the matter is, I love text, but I find the process of writing books very isolating and brutal. And we're in a world where I still believe in the power of text.

I don't believe it's dying, but not everyone is going to sit down and curl up with a 600 page book and dig in. So podcasting is obviously amazing because people can say yes to podcasting without saying no to other things. They can do it while they're jogging or cooking or commuting. But I wanted to try to tackle the visual medium, because I had a lot of fun experimenting with video in the past. I always wanted to be a comic book penciler, and I was an illustrator for a couple of years in college, actually.

So I fantasized about doing that, and the video gave me an opportunity to kind of shake out my wrist and storyboard things and try to put together a story arc based on whatever content I might shoot or already had. So it was a hell of a. The whole tv show is an experiment. Yeah, because people don't realize, like, with documentary style editing, there's obviously all the video. But what makes it really difficult is the editing is where the story actually comes out, and that's where you form the arc of the story.

James Altucher
And it's incredibly difficult to edit a documentary. It's extremely difficult, and it's particularly difficult. I mean, in our case, you pretty much nailed it on the head. I think we had 50 to 60 hours of footage. Now, when I say 50 to 60 hours, I should probably double or triple that because we had multiple cameras.

Right, right. And then you have to chop that down to 22 minutes or so, 21 to 22 minutes. It's an incredibly difficult task, and the way I wanted to do it was very nonfiction. What I mean by that is, I didn't want to record a bunch of footage and then chop it up and move things around chronologically and put things out of order and basically create a story that didn't exist in real life. I didn't want to do that.

Tim Ferriss
So what that meant was we had to plan really meticulously in advance. Like, let's do these following activities, film spontaneously over the next several days, and hopefully that will form a story arc. And if this, then that. If this, then that. If Tim breaks a leg, we do this.

If Tim blows a rotator cuff like I did, we do this. If Tim hits a home run, then we do this. And having these contingencies set up so that the process was even feasible. But, man, I got to tell you, kudos to everybody who works in film and tv. This stuff is really hard to do.

Well, it's really, really tough. I'm super proud of how it came out, but, man, well, that leads to the next thing. So you're super proud how it came out. You did 13 episodes. Just judging from the descriptions of all the episodes, it looks like you had an incredible experience.

James Altucher
And then they kind of cut your neck off. And, like that day when you heard, okay, they're going to cancel this. And obviously, now it's coming out. Today I'm releasing this podcast today, it all comes out. But the day you heard they were canceling this, what was going through your head?

Tim Ferriss
Oh, a lot of things were going through my head. And what made it particularly tough is we were getting a lot of these murmurs of things happening while we were still filming or at least post production. So we were still working on a lot of this stuff.

It was very difficult. Obviously, I think that linear television is very challenged, and networks have a huge challenge on their hands in terms of introducing new programming. So the show itself was put on HLN. And HLN is headline news. I mean, it is courtroom reenactments and drama and news.

I remember the Zimmerman case was the big news at the time, and I didn't feel like it was a. A match demographically at all. And I was actually surprised that it was put on at all. I mean, if that were the only choice available, I was actually surprised and pretty happy. They were like, all right, look, this is the option we have to put it on.

But it made it very difficult for anyone in my audience to watch it because many of them don't have cable, a lot of them don't have HLN. And whenever you have appointment viewing, it's just not how my audience tends to do things. So it hurt a lot. And I think that the only reason I have fought for the last year and a half is because I'm like, you know what? I don't think this got a fair trial.

I really feel like people need to see it in sort of its native environment, in which I kind of envisioned it being digitally released, house of cards style, in my ideal world. But, yeah, that was a brutal day, man. Why didn't they. Why didn't they just do that? Why didn't they just say, okay, Tim, we're not going to put it on HLN.

James Altucher
Who gives a shit anyway? Because no one watches that channel. We're going to put it on iTunes, though. We're going to release it everywhere. We're going to publicize it on CNN.

You'll publicize it on your list. They could have made a good amount of money doing that. It's a great question. And I found that it's difficult. Not all of the reasons for all the decisions were transparent to me, and understandably so.

Tim Ferriss
I mean, Turner Broadcasting, as a massive company, does not have an obligation to share all the details with me. But at the end of the day, the entire division was shut down. So all of the content was pushed into a vault. And this is very. When there is a regime change like that the people who are tasked with managing those assets or the people who inherit them don't really have any incentives to do a lot with them.

And what I mean by that is this happens in music a lot as well, or tv shows when they are going to be renewed or canceled. You'll have a regime change. A new exec will come in and the exec will pretty accurately look at the situation and say, if I do something with this and it fails, I'm going to get all the blame. And if I do something with this and it does well, I'm not going to get any of the credit. So I'm just going to put it in limbo.

I'm going to put it in the vault until maybe a clearer decision can be made. But it's almost like there's no way to fail. If you just release it digitally to iTunes, it's just free money for them. Hey, I hear you. I hear you, I hear you.

And what I realized after it all is, number one, I'm not the easiest person to work with because I'm highly, highly a perfectionist. And I'm the guy who will take a blog post that probably is not that important in the grand scheme of things. From a prosaic standpoint, it's like an announcement, and I'll do 17 revisions until I am happy with how it looks. So when you take that level of OCD and impose it onto a group or people in a large company who are managing dozens of different properties, not just the Tim Ferriss experiment, it tends to drive people crazy on sub level. I've realized if I were to do this again or to do more video content, I would want to go to Kickstarter or a similar platform, raise all the financing myself and really run the show.

I would want to hire everyone and do it myself because there's so many amazing freelancers out there in this world where suddenly people are defecting from places like NPR to help people like you or me with podcast engineering and production, or even in tv and film. You see a lot of this, a lot of the best people are available as freelancers. Hoping this will do with me buying back the license to do digital distribution for this is that it will show artists out there, whether they're, let's say, writers whose books are out of print, but they can't do anything with them because the publisher owns the rights or they are albums. Literally starving musicians who have albums that are just sitting on a shelf not being sold but they can't get the rights back, are going to realize that there are options. You can rescue orphaned content.

And I'm hoping this will just produce a huge wave of these gems being brought back to life and resurrected. Because if you think about it, it could be almost like an alternative investment strategy, like a hedge fund strategy. I'm going to go out there and I'm going to buy the rights to, let's say, 50 forgotten shows, 10,000 forgotten songs, like b side songs, maybe all these books from like the seventies or eighties that are totally out of print and just start releasing them and get like an income stream from all of them. I could probably buy a lot of these things for pennies on the dollar. Yeah, I think that could be a very interesting strategy.

You would need people on staff to manage a lot of paperwork if you are getting the rights from larger organizations, because the larger organizations are typically not highly incentivized to cooperate. But for instance, with the book club, I have a book club, the Tim Ferriss Book club, and I try to resurrect these titles that I think didn't get the attention they deserved. And I produce audiobooks. And what I found is it's generally not worth my time to try to negotiate with the Simon and Schusters and the random houses of the world because there are too many levels, too many approvals, too many restrictions. It just eats up a ton of time.

However, when you go to some of the smaller publishers or agents or authors who own their own rights, it's a totally different ballgame. Then you can do some really fascinating stuff. So I could see someone going out to creators who are doing really well on say, a vimeo or somewhere else and saying, hey, what else do you have that people haven't seen? Or what else do you have that I could help you distribute? Because I have an audience like you or me, that could be very, very interesting.

James Altucher
And you're seeing that happening in publishing a little bit with, you know, publishers are almost using Amazon self publishing as like the minor leagues. So 50 Shades of Grey was originally self published, wool the Martian. Then, you know, they got, they all became bestsellers, self published. And then Simon and trust are in, Random House would go and scoop them up, movies would get made and so on. Oh, definitely.

Tim Ferriss
That's why, you know, I'd be. I'd be astonished, but I'd be astonished, but I wouldn't be surprised if this makes any sense, if studios or people in film weren't already doing this. But if I were in their shoes, I would be scouring Kickstarter to see what campaigns are doing best and saying, hey, I know you guys are going to do a, B and c on your own, but if you want additional distribution or syndication through these following platforms, we'd love to have a conversation with you that gets very interesting.

James Altucher
Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me@altuchermail.com and tell me why you subscribed.

Thanks.

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So I want to just quickly run down some of the different episodes you've done, but then I want to learn a little bit more. We're going to get to these episodes, but I also want a little more about how you actually bought back these rights. So you did the one that I saw, which was rock and roll drumming, where you actually played. How big was the audience when you played live with foreigner? It was a couple of thousand people.

Tim Ferriss
I mean, it was big enough to scare the living hell out of me. I would be scared. I can't even do, like, a TED talk without crapping in my pants. So I can't imagine you did brazilian jiu jitsu. Now, I know you're, like, an athlete in a lot of ways, but was this totally from scratch?

No. I had done some brazilian jiu jitsu a long time ago, many years ago, but this was at a gym in New York City with Marcelo Garcia, who's a six time world champion. And the guys I worked with and sparred with and also got taught by are the top of the top world class competitors. In fact, a guy named John. I think it's Satava.

Might be Satayva, but I think it's Satava. Anyway, John, J o n. Just beat one of the gracies, choked him out with a north south choke in, I think, in the black belt division to head to the world championships. So these guys are just beasts. Great guys, but beasts.

So that was what made that episode really cool. I don't know, James, if you've ever met Josh Waitzkin, you know, I met. Him on a street corner in 1994 very briefly. Wow, that's a hell of a memory. That's incredible.

James Altucher
I remember we were with a mutual friend, and we just talked for, like, a second. Yeah, so Josh is a very close friend. He was the kid, or the inspiration for searching for Bobby Fischer, both the book and the movie. He's considered a chess prodigy, so he helped me learn jiu jitsu through the lens of chess principles, which was so cool, because Josh is also the first black ball, if my memory serves me, right, under Marcelo Garcia. So that was.

Tim Ferriss
That was a really. That's one of my favorite episodes, because we used both the jiu jitsu and the chess, and the parallels between the two. Well, you know, I could see how the chess could be related, actually. I could see how chess could be kind of the science of learning chess is kind of is related to all of these episodes. And I want to get to that, but I just want to describe some of these other things.

James Altucher
So then you did one called the dating game where you. Where Neil Strauss basically helped you with your game. Yeah, Neil Strauss, author of the game. Exactly. We had Neil, who forced me to do cold approaches, which was hugely embarrassing and hilarious.

What does that mean? It means you just walked up to a girl and started talking to her. Yeah, that's it. That's walking up to strangers and trying to get their phone number. We had to do that at the ferry building in SF on.

Tim Ferriss
I think it was a Saturday. So if you want to talk about a crowded environment, that's it. But we also had a computer hacker helping me optimize online dating. And then we met with a matchmaker as well to see how all three approaches would compare actually. Okay, so I want to actually focus on that for just a quick second.

James Altucher
So a when you just cold approach, did you have to kind of build up? Did you, how quickly did your courage sort of reveal itself? Like, I would have been scared at first, but then I imagine after a few you get used to it. I wish I could say that after three I was smooth as silk, but I was nervous. It probably took me ten.

Tim Ferriss
You know what, let me rephrase that. I was nervous every time I did it. Even if I had a semi successful approach or got a number, if I had to do it again, it was right back to the primal reptile brain fear. I have never been the kind of guy to do that. If I'm seated next to an attractive lady at a dinner or something like that, I can hold my own because there's a context.

But for me to walk up and jedi mind track them into talking to me when they're on their way to someplace else is not a natural skill for me. What were some of the techniques that Neil said you can use for a cold approach? Well, there are a couple of techniques, but the simplest would just be asking a question of some type. So it's like, hey, well, actually he wouldn't want me to say sorry, that was a bad habit that I have. But you could ask, say, a woman for I need a female opinion on x.

Right? Should I buy this type of sweater or this type of sweater for a friend or whatever it might be? And you're giving them a question, for instance, that is not going to be the frequently asked question that they get every time some yahoo walks up to them at say, a bar. Right, right. And you know, Sammy the hacker is amazing.

Very good friend of mine, who's just a hell of a guy and a really very much a genius when it comes to any type of social engineering or computer hacking. He set up a female dating profile for himself so that he could see what the headlines were in the messages that got sent via the inbox, like the messaging capability. And he was able to identify the two or three things that came up repeatedly and then not say those things. So there are ways to optimize the system, and a very interesting one is to split test your. Actually, yeah, you are split testing your profile pics.

And you can use OkCupid, I think you can use it even if you don't use the service. There's a feature called my best face, and it allows people in the community to vote, basically vote you up or down, hot or not style or Tinder style, on your photos. And it will tell you after 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever, exactly which photos you should use for your profile. I was really surprised at what did well, the photos that I thought would kill it tanked, and the ones that I couldn't care less about did really well. So it just goes to show how my intuition does not serve me very well.

James Altucher
But you know what, that's interesting, because the same thing happens in almost every area of life. So, like, take investing in startups, almost nobody knows in advance what's going to make a successful startup, else. Everyone would just invest in the next Uber. So, you know, people have a very inflated sense of what they can predict, and that's an example of it. Oh, 100% agreed.

Tim Ferriss
I mean, and there are a lot of great books that expand on that. I mean, predictably irrational, stumbling on happiness, we are terrible at predicting what will work. So, in the cold approaches, though, what did you find by the end of the week? What did work for you? Other than kind of asking these, this sweater or this sweater questions, were there any body language techniques?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, you can stand laterally, so you're not pressing them up against a farmer's market stall or anything like that, or invading personal space. So body angling, I think is very important. General demeanor. If you come off as really super anxious, that obviously does not help matters.

So I think that one of the most helpful rules that Neil forced me to follow, although I wasn't perfect in the beginning, certainly was the three second rule, and that is don't over deliberate approaching, just make the approach, just rack up mileage, basically. So I do think it is almost more than anything else, a matter of inoculating yourself against fear by experiencing low level of fear over and over and over again. So I do think, like many things, this is a matter of, of repetition, but I don't think. It doesn't take all too many. I mean, I think if you were to do it for an hour, you could very quickly be at ease with being ill at ease.

James Altucher
Maybe you could, but look at me. I would take at least a year or two. I think you'd be better. You know, James, I'm going to challenge you there. I think you would be better than I was.

Tim Ferriss
I think that you, I hope you take this the right way. I think you care less about what people think of you than I do. And I try very hard not to be affected by, like, what was the. Worst rejection you got? They weren't that bad.

That's the thing. You just get people who are, like, really uncomfortable and anxious. They're like, sorry, sorry, I'm busy, I'm on my way somewhere. And then they split, and it's just, they don't talk to you at all. There was no, you know, no one threw ice cream in my face.

Or what about, though? What about when you took it to the next step, though, and said, okay, you like this sweater? Can I have your phone number? Well, there are some steps in between that I managed to flub on a couple of different occasions when I got to the phone number point and I only asked a few people because I was a coward, but they gave me their number because I created some type of context or established some type of common interest, blah, blah, blah. So they were actually less terrifying than I expected they would be, and.

Which is, of course, silly. But you have to keep in mind, all of my horrific failures from junior high and high school came back to haunt me when I tried to revisit this, because I have tried very hard to design a life where I don't have to do cold approaches. That's how much I dislike doing cold approaches. So, of course, that's exactly what Neil wanted me to do. It's sort of like, step number one, write a best selling book and then go to lots of parties about the book.

James Altucher
That's the best technique of all. Well, I mean, you could do that. I mean, you might end up dating people with questionable motives, if that's your, you know, if I took a copy of my book and, like, threaded it around my neck, and then people would ask me, I'll be like, oh, this thing. Yeah, let me tell you about this. But, yeah, dinner.

Tim Ferriss
Dinner is my game cold approaches. You know, I could use some work, but I think it's. I think it's. I like people to see the failures because it's one of those cases where whatever I manage to do right is due to a toolkit that I've tried very hard to refine over time. It's not because I knock it out of the park at all of my at bats.

I screw up more than most people I know. It's just that when you see the highlight reel in a bio or the book, that's the end product. You don't see everything that goes into it and all of the face palming and sort of stumbling that went on in the process. Okay, so the 12th episode I was curious about because I played quite a bit of poker in my life. And did you start from scratch in your knowledge of poker?

I did, yeah. I had never played a hand of poker. I literally never played at all. So Phil Gordon is obviously a great player and he was helping you? Yeah, Phil's made, I think, I don't know, three or 4 million in purse, and he is a former computer science guy.

So he was just the perfect person to sit down with me and could really walk me through the fundamentals, but also sequence things in the right fashion and understanding that the challenge at the end of the week was to play heads up, one on one against a couple of professionals for thousands of dollars of my own money. I think it was 1500 total or 3000, something like that, which is real cash. As you know, probably you behave very differently and your psychological state is very different. When you're playing with your real money versus play money or no money, and. Also heads up versus a full table, statistics becomes much less important, and your actual reading of the body language and everything becomes much more important.

James Altucher
And that's incredibly more difficult. It's super hard. All of the factors are hard. So poker was one of those. That really was one of the many skills.

Tim Ferriss
This was not the only one that addressed a phobia of math of mine that I've had since I had, since 9th grade. I had a very ball busting teacher in 9th grade math who, for whatever reason, a female teacher, a very good teacher, but she had an axe to grind with all the male students in the classroom, and almost all of them opted out of math after that, that I'm aware of, including me. So part of the reason I went to Princeton Undergrad was because, and I don't talk about this much, but Princeton didn't have a math requirement. I would think you're an analytical kind of guy. I would think, like, math would be sort of natural for you.

It's not. It's not. And I enjoy using math in the context of certain types of split testing and analytics and just self tracking with blood tests and so on. But that's usually right. Writing down numbers and doing basic arithmetic.

The probabilistic thinking and mental calculation required of poker, because I did do some table play as well. It wasn't all heads up, but that was very counter to my own programming because I've tried so hard to avoid it for so long. But poker is fascinating to me because it's not just dependent, obviously, on the math, it's dependent on many different factors, including patients, and different people have different styles of play. But statistically, the amount that you, or the percentage of hands that you fold is just mind blowing, right. And people get bored, and then they start betting, and then they make bad decisions and they lose a lot of money.

Oftentimes, not always, but that self control was interesting to me because I don't have. What I don't have any trouble doing is being bored for a long period of time. If I have a system that requires that, I'm okay with that. So math can give you that at the table, but when your head's up, you can't do that at all. It's the reverse strategy.

Well, no, you can. I mean, when, I don't want to give away too much, but I folded a lot in heads up, and I was running a lot of math in my head. I mean, I'm sure not nearly as much if you're doing a high stakes game with eight people at a table, but I was running a lot of math because the blinds, and I don't want to. This might be inside baseball for people who've never played poker, but the blinds, which are basically the required bets that you must put out on the table so that there's something to play for, those were going up every, I think, ten minutes or five minutes. So the.

The decisions I made had to change accordingly. And again, this is speaking from the standpoint of a novice, but they're pretty interesting results. I got to say, it was a very fascinating experience. I loved Phil's style of coaching. Being in Vegas for two weeks straight because I did another episode in Vegas was a little much for me on the strip.

Being on the strip for two weeks, I felt like I had to go sort of take a de lousing bath every night and then go find where I'd lost my soul at the end of that period of time on the strip. Yeah. Las Vegas is like this alternate reality. It's hard to get used to it. I think it is.

James Altucher
The 13th episode looks fascinating, and particularly the way it's shot in the trailer. You're like a superhero, practically. So it's urban evasion and escape. So I guess the idea is what happens if you're kind of kidnapped and handcuffed and a bag is put over your head and you're far away from anybody who can hear you scream and you are supposed to get out of that situation? And obviously, you had never done that before.

Tim Ferriss
No, I hadn't done that before. And the context for that is really the fact that at one point, the people at Turner very kindly asked me, and this is something no tv people had ever asked me before, which was, if you could do anything in tv, what would you want to do? Usually I'd had people involved in tv come to me and say, hey, here's what we're doing. We're looking for a host, or we're looking for a judge. Do you want to do it?

And there was zero creative input from me. So the answer, one of my answers to the folks when they asked me that was, I'd like to create a show about becoming Jason Bourne and how people can become Jason porn. And there are definitely some James Bond elements in there. But if you look at the show and all the episodes, you have language learning, rally car racing, escape sequences and stuff. Well, you have the art of parkour, which is, I don't know if I said it right, but it's like where you're kind of jumping around from wall to wall like Jason Bourne.

Yeah, exactly. Or the initial chase scene in Casino Royale, basically ninja plus breakdancer over obstacles, which is, that was a really painful episode. The escape and evasion was sort of the final piece in the puzzle. I was like, okay, well, let's really figure out, and I wanted to learn this stuff, quite frankly, because I travel to a lot of places where there are kidnapping risks also, and I'm doing less of that. But I've historically spent a lot of time in South America and in Central America, and those are real risks.

I mean, those are industries in many of those countries, in many of those countries. And you'll have organized crime with, with relationships at the airport, who will read flight manifests to determine who makes promising targets, and they'll use Google and other tools to establish that. So I wanted to learn for very practical purposes what happens if I am kidnapped or if I am hooded. Or if I have zip ties tied around my wrists and my ankles, how could I conceivably get out of such a situation or just as important, prevent it in the first place? So that was, or for instance, hot wiring a car.

That was very fun. Just the kind of being kidnapped, handcuffed, hooded, everything. Is it possible to escape that? It is with some basic preparation. And in many cases you don't even need a lot of tools.

You could just use your body. And in fact, I mean, for instance, if you have someone wrap like seven layers of duct tape around your wrists and your arms, which is very common, and say, hostage situations, that's very easy to get out of with no tools, astonishingly enough. So it is possible. What's the trick? I don't want to give away the show, but I personally want to know the trick.

Okay, the trick is, and there are a lot of physics involved, I'll give you the basics, but what you have to do is sort of form fists with your hands, apply pressure outward with your wrists, and then slam the space in between your elbows into your own ribs. And clearly you can do some damage to yourself. You could even break ribs. But if your choice is that or getting out, then that is one way to do it. And I was able to do that on the first try.

I'm pretty sure the duct tape was surprisingly easy to get out of. The others are more challenging, especially the handcuffs. And if the handcuffs are behind the. Back, it's even harder. And we used official issue, I think, Smith and Wesson police handcuffs.

But I'll put it this way. I don't think that it's possible necessarily to mitigate for all disaster scenarios, but it's cheap insurance and smart insurance in my opinion. And it's also fun to have a basic repertoire of techniques that could address a handful of common situations.

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James Altucher
So throughout all of these, and, okay, so there's. There's tactical shooting. There's starting a business. There's open water swimming, there's surfing, there's golf. Oh, okay, let's talk about golf for a second.

Nobody can possibly teach me to go from 140 golf to, like, 100 golf. Like, what happened, like, what happened in that show. That show we used a lot of motion capture to do very biomechanics oriented analysis to see, for instance, which parts of my body were moving in what plane, at what speed, in what order, which is very important if you're looking at, say, the kinetic chain. And, like, do you move your knee first? Which knee?

Tim Ferriss
Do you move your hip first? In what order should those happen? And we also did a lot of drilling and practice on principles that are oftentimes overlooked in golf. And I do not golf. I don't have a golf.

This was ground zero and up. So, like, before this, if you went to an 18 hole golf course, what would you shoot? I wouldn't even know what number to give you. Like, quite honestly. I mean, I had never played on an 18 hole golf course ever.

James Altucher
Are you allowed to say how you did by the end? Can you say the score, what you scored, what you shot by the end? I'm not gonna. I'm not. We did not do, like, an 18 hole course.

Tim Ferriss
There were other goals. Okay, but I'll leave that one for the folks to see. That was one where we had a miracle of sorts, which was pretty amazing, but I'll let people check that one out. Now, from the beginning of the series to the end, did you find yourself getting better at the process of learning kind of, like, the meta aspects of it? Definitely.

Absolutely. And is it sort of like the. Difference between learning, like, a fourth language from learning a third language? You know, if you learn ten languages, I'm sure the 10th is easier than the 9th. Yeah, it's very similar.

And also, I learned a lot about managing the process. Right. I mean, this is a team I hadn't worked with before, with a schedule I hadn't been on before. I started to figure out, okay, at what point should I interrupt training, or should I ask for a half a day of training without any cameras so that it's uninterrupted because really, a day of filming meant I maybe got three to 4 hours of practice. It was very insanely compressed.

So when I say doing something in a week, for many of these skills, I only had maybe 12 hours of total practice. It was really, really stressful. But I did learn, for instance, that given the compressed timeframe, at the end of the second day of practice that night, I would have like a physical. A complete physical sense of overwhelm and basically a mini nervous breakdown. Like, it was very.

It was very predictable. Like, because you were afraid you were going to fail at the goal. I was afraid I was going to fail. But it was also just an information overload point where I was hitting my. My biology.

I mean, my neurophysiology. Maybe it was depletion of neurotransmitters. I don't know the exact cause mechanically, but I was reaching a point where very predictably, at the end of the second day, at night, I would have the equivalent of a complete system shutdown. And that would require me to prioritize sleep, for instance, more on the second night than on some of the subsequent nights, because I needed that period of adaptation. And I could take things like supplements like hooperzine A to increase REM sleep, to help with the skill consolidation and stuff like that.

James Altucher
Wait, what's that supplement? I don't think I know it. Huperzine A. Obviously it's very powerful. I'm not a doctor.

Tim Ferriss
Don't play one on the Internet. So talk to your medical professional. But hooperzine A is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. It inhibits the breakdown of acetylcholine and in the lucid dreaming community, which has been verified in sleep labs and so on. It's the ability of becoming conscious that you're dreaming when you dream, which has really fascinating implications for skill acquisition.

But you can induce lucidity with greater frequency if you use huberzine A, it would appear. And for me, since I'm using sleep and REM sleep, which some people speculate or theorize, is involved with memory consolidation and skill acquisition, I wanted to use huberzine A as sort of an unfair advantage to increase the rate at which I would absorb these new skills. But that would be much more. I didn't use it for the entire time of filming because I cycle on and off of it. I think it's a very powerful pharmaceutical.

But these are the types of things that I figured out, given the constraints and the length of the show. On which day, for instance, should I increase my protein intake? Because I need to handle muscular repair but might not have opportunities to do so otherwise. So I started having the production crew help get me isopur whey protein drinks so that I could take those, like every three to 4 hours if I was doing something very, very intense, like the brazilian jiu jitsu or the parkour or something like that. Because I realized if I waited until after filming to consume protein, it was too late.

I already had a lot of microtrauma, and I would be incredibly sore the next day. So I started traveling with an ultrasound unit and electrical stimulation unit and so on. And I should also say that a lot of the extra footage I was able to get a hold of. And what that means is instead of having just 22 minutes, I have hours of bonus footage, including extended interviews with, say, the golf instructor, extended demos, and all sorts of amazing footage that we just couldn't include because of space constraints. So that stuff is all going to be@fourhourworkweek.com tv just all spelled out f o u r.

So it seems like. I know from, let's take a basic example, like chess. So they've done all sorts of studies on what makes the difference between a chess amateur, a chess master, and a chess grandmaster. And the main thing is a chess master and a grandmaster is able to do a lot of pattern recognition. So, for instance, a castled king is considered a chunk of knowledge.

James Altucher
And so rather than like an amateur who's studying where every piece is on the board, a master might be familiar with what to do in ten, with 10,000 knowledge of 10,000 chunks, and a grandmaster might have knowledge of 100,000 kind of chunks of knowledge. And do you find that it works the same way in all these other fields? Absolutely, 100%. And I do think, however, cause I. Noticed you were doing that on the first episode, the drumming.

It was like you were extremely quickly trying to chunk the basic elements of drumming as opposed to just hitting the drums, for instance. Right, instead of playing notes, identifying how to break it down to the pre chorus, the chorus, so that you have these sort of discrete containers that are more manageable than a thousand discrete pieces. And absolutely, you see that in the rally racing, it would be where are you looking? How are you positioning your body? And what are the chunks in the visual field that you pay attention to as opposed to ignore?

Tim Ferriss
In chess? It could be exactly what you described, among other things. In fact, one of the bonus clips, there might be a little bit of this in the episode, but there's an extended scene. You'll love this there's a bonus clip. I went to Washington Square park, where they have all the speed chess.

James Altucher
Oh, man. I grew up in Washington Square Park. I should have gone out there and watched you go at it. Well, I brought a grandmaster with me who played one of the guys, and he played without looking at the board. It's an amazing exchange.

Who did you bring with you? Can I ask? Maurice. Maurice Ashley? Yeah, Maurice Ashley, who is amazing.

Tim Ferriss
He's like Morpheus. He's one of the coolest cats you could ever imagine. He's so awesome. And what's great about Maurice is that he also knows how to smack talk back. So he was not a sitting duck for taking any abuse.

So he's just, like, slowly smashing this guy. Actually, not so slowly, very quickly. And the guy's trying to shit talk to throw him off, and he's like, oh, well, don't get so funky now. And he's, like, watching him, it's awesome. It's such a cool exchange.

But the chunking into these discrete pieces is very accurate with languages. Same story. Right. And that's why there are examples online. If you're a native english speaker, for instance, can you read this jumbled text?

I don't even know if you would find it if you google that. But there are examples of, like, can you read this sentence? And the letters are all kind of out of order in each word, or they're upside down, but your brain decodes the words so that you can read the sentences because your eyes are so accustomed to the morphology of certain words, like the d with the uptick, like the upstroke on the d, that it can decipher what the page is trying to say, even though everything is written incorrectly. It's so fascinating. But here's the problem a little bit, though.

James Altucher
So, like, let's take chess as an example. It could take two or three years of solid practice for or more than that, depending on talent levels and other things and who your instructor is, it could take years to learn those 10,000 chunks to play at a master level. And yet let's take drumming. You're playing in front of an audience of thousands in a week. Well, I'd say two things to that.

Tim Ferriss
The first is there are definitely skills that allow you to fake it sooner than others. Obviously, you can fake playing the drums a lot sooner than you can fake playing the violin, for instance. And that's absolutely the case. Doesn't mean that drumming isn't difficult. But on a level of complexity, there are certain things you can fake sooner than others, or to the untrained eye or ear, things that you can do with certain skills.

I would say, though, with. With chess, I would absolutely maintain that what I said in the four hour chef, which is within six months, you could get to top 5% in the general population if that became basically your full time priority. Excuse me, allergic to the 10,000 hours rule. So I do think that chess is a very particular example. I think chess is perhaps the hardest of the skills that I participated in to get into the top 5% in the world who are not treating it like a master or grandmaster track for a lot of reasons.

But I think that chess is. You could get very good at chess and beat almost every civilian you play with in six months or less, no doubt in my mind whatsoever. I really believe that. I agree with that. I think it's probably six months for that, and then it's a whole.

James Altucher
But that's probably true for poker as well. It's true for all of them. And I think my job is to, there's something called a sigmoid curve that applies to a lot of natural systems, options trading, and also learning where you basically have. Imagine an s, where you grab the two ends of the s and stretch it out horizontally so it looks kind of like a step. That is what learning generally looks like, where you have very slow gains.

Tim Ferriss
Very slow gains. Next to nothing. Next to nothing. Then you have this, like, cambrian explosion of skill development, where all of a sudden you go from not being able to communicate with anyone in Spanish to, oh, my God, I just held, like, a 32nd conversation. Massive breakthrough.

Or you win your first game of poker, whatever it is, and then you very quickly flatten out again, and you have this point of diminishing return. So my job is to, there are people like Josh Waitzkin, for instance. We talk about this in the show. It's a really fun juxtaposition. His job is to get people from, like, 99 to 99.999.

My job is to get people from zero to top 5% in the world in six months or less. And I think that I can do that. I'm good at it. And I've spent, if people ask me like, oh, well, what are you really good at? Because you're just a jack of all trades.

You're a dilettante who's just dabbling on all these things. I'm like, no, no, no, you're missing the meta here. The skill that I'm refining is meta learning. It's the toolkit. It's like you can use a saw or a hammer or a screwdriver to build all sorts of things, anything.

And I'm trying to refine those tools that other people can use. Whether they want to learn Spanish, Japanese, how to cook Japanese, horseback, archery, rally racing, poker, excel, spreadsheets, doesn't matter. Let's take language as an example. Episode three in the season is you are learning, basically Tagalog, the Filipino language, in the period of a week. So how did you get yourself, and let's talk about it from a meta level rather than the specifics of the language.

James Altucher
What were you thinking going into that? How you were going to do it? Going into it? I needed to first know thy opponent. I really needed someone who could help me deconstruct the language, help me know what is most difficult for native english speakers.

Tim Ferriss
What is easiest for native english speakers? If there are ways I can cheat. So, for instance, if there's something very difficult about it, is there an alternative construction that I can use which will still be proper Tagalog that will not make my head explode? Because I don't have time for that head exploding component. If I only have.

In this case, it was, like, three or four days. It was insane. That's incredible. Yeah. I can't believe it.

Oh, my God. Were you scared? I was terrified. I was terrified for all of these. And.

And I've done a lot of crazy things. I've done a lot of very aggressive things in my life, but I'm still human. I'm very. I don't want to be publicly humiliated, especially on. On television.

James Altucher
Would you have been publicly humiliated? Like, would they have aired it if you failed? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They would have aired it, absolutely.

Tim Ferriss
And. And I don't win in all these episodes. I should make that clear. Or I have breakthroughs in every episode, but some of them end catastrophically, so not all of them. Yeah.

James Altucher
Can you tell me one episode which ends catastrophically? Parkour. That was bad. This is a year and a half later. I'm still contending with injuries that I had from that episode.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Really? Really. Some gnarly, gnarly, long term joints. Did you cry on the show in pain?

I didn't cry. I definitely winced and close my eye and drop to a knee and so on. And I spent a lot of time on a pt table. So you have footage of me getting treated by doctors as well? Oh, my God.

James Altucher
It's like the $6 million man. Now that team has to come in, rebuild you. Yeah. It was a process of breaking myself down and then rebuilding myself over the weekend for the next. The next episode.

So, okay, so the Filipino language. So you're understanding the opponent and breaking it down in the same way you would approach, say, tennis. And the next step would be selecting the highest frequency vocabulary and grammatical construction so that I am getting sort of 80% of what I need from 20% of the content. Right. What you said, is that a memory thing?

Tim Ferriss
That is a memory thing. So I worked with some incredible people, like Ed Cook, who trained a writer named Josh Foer, who wrote moonwalking with Einstein to become the national memory champion in the United States in one year. So I had Ed Cooke helping me with some of the techniques. I, of course, have a lot in my own back pocket just after years of doing this. And so using mnemonic devices, memory tools and devices to memorize hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words in one or two days, it's very achievable but very intense.

And then practicing in live environments as much as possible. So in La, I stayed with a family that spoke Tagalog. That was a key component. And then really trying to predict, okay, what are the questions they're most likely to ask me in an interview? And this is something you can do anytime you learn a language, they're going to be asking you questions like, why did you choose to learn x?

Where are you from? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where did you grow up? So I had to make sure that I wrote out my biography, like, here's Tim's life story, and then basically broke it down into responses to questions. And I was like, all right, I need to learn at a very minimum as a starting point, all of this, and then stalling tactics.

So what are the techniques that you can use in Tagalog that are like, oh, that's a good question. Well, I'm really glad you asked that. Give me a moment to think about that. I want to give you a good answer. If I'm having trouble recalling a certain phrase or word, how do I buy time so that I have 10 seconds to try to process?

These are all approaches that you can use in other skills. So you can buy time in many different ways. You can find coping mechanisms. But perhaps the most important thing to do with all these skills is look for unorthodox teachers and practitioners who are good at it, who shouldn't be good at it. So someone who has very little training, who's really good at it.

James Altucher
Oh, sorry. Let me just say one more thing. Or, for instance, if you're trying to learn how to swim like study amputees. How do people without legs swim? And that will teach you more about biomechanics than all of the so called best practices and traditional swimming manuals combined.

Tim Ferriss
And if you're looking at ultra endurance running or running marathons, find someone who's really, really big, who can do it and has good time, because they're compensating for sort of bad God given build in genetics for this particular sport with technique, and you can't copy attributes, right? Like Michael Phelps hands and feet size, you're not going to get that just by taking growth hormone or something. So you have to make up for it with technique. Okay, so that's very interesting. So let's take something like basketball.

James Altucher
Neither you or I are six foot eight or anything like that. So how would you. And basketball is not in your series at all. If you were told today, okay, Tim, you've got five days to become a basketball champ, or at least compete with the Knicks a little bit, what would you start doing? I would, well, the next is a tall order, but I would say I would focus on.

Tim Ferriss
I would do an assessment almost like a business. I would do a swot assessment. I would have the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. What are the things that could go right? What are the things that could go wrong?

Given that my vertical leap is x and this, and this, this profile, what would I have to focus on to even be a team member? And ultimately, it would probably come down to passing and perhaps long distance shots. And as a side note, I did actually tackle this in the four hour chef because I had always viewed basketball as a huge embarrassment and failure of mine. It was something I was very embarrassed about because I was a wrestler. Wrestlers are cavemen.

We can't dribble and do layups. And I was ridiculed by a PE coach back in junior high when I tried to try out for the JV basketball team. So I just shelved it, and I had these very, very bad sort of negative self image problems related to it. Ultimately, you can break it down. And I would focus on shooting.

I would focus on shooting and passing, most likely, and how I can compensate for my weaknesses. So I think that, and there's a very interesting piece, I think, that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker about non obvious basketball strategy that was used by some, I think, entrepreneur indian fellow who coached his daughters basketball team. He had never played basketball before, and I think he took them to an undefeated season. So there's team level strategy, and then there's personal strategy, and both would have to interplay so that I would not embarrass myself and everyone else on the court. But that's how I would think about it.

James Altucher
Would you look for, like, the Harlem Globetrotters has some smaller players? Would you look for their techniques of what they were doing? Absolutely. Yeah. I would look for the shortest guys in the game.

Tim Ferriss
I would look for the oldest guys in the game, ideally someone who matched my sort of phylogenomics or whatever. I mean, I try to find a white guy, right, who is. If I could, it might not be able to, but I try to find someone who matched me attribute wise as closely as possible to model. If I couldn't do that, though, I'd still be looking for outliers, people who are older, people who are slower, people who are shorter, et cetera, because I would be in that bucket. And then I would try to identify who they're mentors and coaches were, because if I talk to their NBA coach, he's not going to be nearly as helpful, necessarily to me, given my skill level, than their high school coach, who was dealing with teams with far lower skill sets and less refined technique and less experience.

So I would certainly not shy away from going to a high school coach who had dealt with shorter people who went on to become superstars. Absolutely. Okay, so now what happened? They canceled the show. Obviously, you wanted to buy the rights because you wanted to share this with the world.

James Altucher
How did you go about getting the rights? I've never actually heard of anybody getting the rights to their show back. Yeah, it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears and money. Did they say no at first? They didn't say no so much as we don't want to do a deal with Tim Ferriss, but they were considering many different options for the show.

Tim Ferriss
And the reason it took so long is partially because they were shutting down the entire division. So they were more occupied with the priority of letting people go, negotiating severance packages, and providing a soft landing for all of that than making deals for divesting themselves of the show, which was probably written off by that point anyway. So it wasn't like they had a p and l obligation to do a deal. The way I got it ultimately, was by trying to understand the incentives of everyone involved, and then also ultimately working with a lawyer who had done a lot of deals with Turner broadcasting so that he was familiar with what they could do, couldn't do, and so on. You basically use your technique of learning, on learning how to buy the rights of your show.

Yeah, exactly. It was exactly that, and I just read a quote from Thomas Edison yesterday that I thought was just so perfect it should be my life mantra, which is when you think you've examined, or I said, when you've examined all of the possible options, just remember colonial, you haven't. Isn't that the truth? Well, so you're releasing all the episodes today? April 28.

James Altucher
Fourhourworkweek.com tv I think the valuable, obviously, I'm sure you edited this great. All the storytelling is great. But for me, the valuable thing is to kind of understand how you meta learned, how you kind of learn to learn, because I think that's where education needs to go. So I actually think this is an incredibly valuable series for not only myself, but my children. I'm going to have, I'm going to force them to watch it, even though you're a guy and they only watch stuff with girls in it right now, but I'm going to force them to watch it.

Tim Ferriss
Well, I will tell you that some of the folks involved with the show, I had dinner with one of them and they asked their two daughters if they wanted to watch the show, and they were totally hooked. And these are like ten and twelve years old. I think there's something. I think there's something there. Man, I hope so.

James Altucher
Okay, well, good luck. I can't wait to, I can't wait to see these. All right. Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Sam.

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Visit energytrust.org dot from pit lane to. Podium, the Las Vegas Grand Prix is providing fans a race day experience at the speed they deserve. With the help of T Mobile for business, our 5g advanced network solutions are powering race day operations with event wide connectivity, from streamlined gate entry to an immersive app, giving fans blazing fast access to the sport they love. This is accelerating innovation. This is the Las Vegas Grand Prix with T Mobile for business.

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Tim Ferriss: 10 Years Later...

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1. Introduction

2. Revisiting The Tim Ferriss Experiment

3. Philosophies on Learning

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